Providing a good experience for both near-field communication (NFC) and human-touch capacitive sensing is relatively challenging, especially when the active areas of NFC and human-touch capacitive sensing overlap. In one specific example, an NFC device may be proximate to (or integrated with) a capacitive sensing device (e.g., trackpad) on a computer. However, the co-existence of these devices may introduce noise and/or block the NFC signal when driving the capacitive elements of the capacitive sensing device. Some conventional approaches physically separate the NFC device from the capacitive sensitive device such that they are disposed on separate areas of the computer. However, these conventional approaches are not necessarily aesthetically acceptable or particularly intuitive.
Other conventional approaches integrated these devices within a single unified interaction point, but provide a user interface to switch from touch mode to NFC listening mode for a certain period of time. However, these conventional approaches are not necessarily beneficial from a user experience point of view. Furthermore, enabling the co-existence of these devices while providing interactivity that is acceptable at a human level is relatively difficult, considering users can detect tens of milliseconds of latency in touch capacitive sensing and expect an NFC response usually within a second.